What do people think of Microsoft's Products?

[LongHaul]

What do people think of Microsoft's Products?

 

Quality, ease of use, pricing, etc?

[petec]

As a shareholder since 2010 who has no intention of selling I'm biased (!) but the ones I use (Windows, Office, Hotmail, OneDrive mainly) are just so deeply embedded in my life I find it hard to imagine bothering to switch. That's not to say they're perfect but they're bloody good and I don't even bother looking for alternatives.

 

The only thing that gives me pause is a moderately significant company I know of that recently switched over to GSuite and claims it's transformed productivity. Having never used it I can't comment but I've followed MSFT since about 2004 and at every stage there's been someone knocking on one of their doors but none of their major businesses has been disrupted. I recall around the time I first bought that Google Docs, which was free on the web, was touted by some to be a real issue for Office; 6 years later I remember reading that in absolute terms more people were switching from GDocs to Office than the other way around, which is incredible when you think of the relative size of the user bases.

 

Edit: I forgot OneNote and Surface. Super products.

[muscleman]

Their products are a piece of crap. They maintained the market share mostly through bullying customers to sign 20 year contracts for SQL server and other products. But what can their customers do? I heard stories like almost all fortune 500 reps came to the SQL server group to yell at them and were very upset about their crappy product, and then at the end of the day, sign another 20 contract.

I was working in the Office group, and one day I got a customer reported bug and was pretty nervous and jumped onto it right away, and got laughed at by other senior devs. They said the first thing to do is to check how big the customer is. If it is not a fortune 500 customer, just tell him to go away. I was shocked by the attitude.

 

Their search engine Bing is a complete failure too. They couldn't compete with Google, so they decided to just query Google and copy the search results, which caused a lawsuit of Google suing MSFT. Guess what MSFT argued? They said something like, Google search engine is free to be looked up by anyone in the world, so that should include MSFT Bing crawlers as well.  ;D

 

What about Holo lens? That's a joke too.

 

But I have to admit that they have a huge moat. Fortune 500 companies have no incentive to switch away because saving a few pennies for a slightly better performance while taking huge risks for switching the technology stack just makes no sense to their CEOs. I think MSFT's future will be bright by continuing to squeeze and bully their customers.

 

[Munger_Disciple]

I gave up Microsoft products about 10 yers ago after using them for 18 years before that. I had initially switched to Open Office, an open source Office software and then to Google Apps. All I can say is that I do not miss Microsoft products at all and I am much happier as a result. The Google Apps are way easier to use, have better integration between desktop and mobile use, and are almost free compared to the cost of MS products.

 

I would say that for >95% of people Google products are all they need. There might be some use cases where only Excel would do for instance but in my opinion those cases are becoming rarer every day.

[rkbabang]

The company I work for was using google products (gmail, google docs) and we were then acquired by a larger company that uses all Microsucks office products (outlook, office, skype, etc).  It was a huge step backwards.  Everyone I've talked to is frustrated with how much Microsoft products suck compared to what we were using before.  At home I haven't used MS since Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.  I've been using Linux and for the last 4 years an iMac.  Luckily I'm an engineer and most of what I do at work is still done on Linux, the MS office products are just for meetings, email, presentations, etc which isn't a huge part of my job.

 

[DooDiligence]

I switched to Pages, Numbers, Keynote & Mail years ago & haven't missed Office at all.

 

I can start a document on my iPhone, iPad or Mac & seamlessly continue working on it on any of the 3 platforms.

 

For instance, last night I created a document on Pages & this morning I went to a study session & forgot to bring my Mac.

I was telling one of my study partners about the document & he wanted a copy so I pulled it up on my phone, exported it as a pdf & texted it to him.

Easy peasy.

 

He discovered an error in the data on the document & I changed & saved it using my phone.

I'm at home now & bam, there it is on my Mac.

 

These are the best of times...

[KCLarkin]

What do people think of Microsoft's Products?

 

Quality, ease of use, pricing, etc?

 

I don't think many of Microsoft's products rate highly on quality, ease of use, or pricing. They rate higher on other factors though (backwards compatibility, standardization, lock-in, etc).

 

Windows has so much cruft, it really doesn't have any redeeming qualities. I switched to Mac about 5 years ago. Probably the best tech decision I ever made. I can't even fathom how many hours I've spent trying to keep Windows machines running smoothly. My Mac runs smoothly as long as I reboot every few weeks. Same with iOS.

 

I gave up on Office many years ago. I didn't mind the product, but I get everything I need from Google Docs, LibreOffice, and the Mac apps.

 

Skype was pretty awful when I used it. Google Hangouts was much better. Don't use either anymore.

 

I had at a startup. We used development tools like MySQL, Github, Trello, Atlassian. We were bought by a company that used Microsoft development tools. I found most of the Microsoft tools insanely complicated. We kept using the more user-friendly tools and only used Microsoft when we absolutely had to.

 

I don't have any experience with Azure. But AWS has an obvious edge here.

 

Overall, I don't think there is any Microsoft product I've ever used that is best-in-class. Actually, MS Money was pretty good, but they couldn't compete with Quicken.

 

[rb]

I genuinely, truly like Microsoft products. Though I only use the desktop/laptop stuff.

 

I like Windows and I really like office. As a power excel user nothing else comes close. I would get really frustrated if I'd try to do something that excel would have no problem doing but this other thing can't. It's just not worth the hassle for me. Also I don't like the cloud stuff so I use office on prem not the 365 stuff. That's big for me.

 

With Windows I really like that it lets me do computing however I like, not how a bunch of engineers in California or wherever think that computing should be done. Sure windows 8 sucked, but that didn't bother me too much because I just stuck with 7 which was perfectly ok. Then they came up with 10 which works great. I also never experienced much of the business from windows that others have been complaining about. It's true that i have a somewhat powerful rig, but it still cost significantly less than what a mac would have. Otherwise I don't think much about Windows, it's there, does it's job and doesn't bother me. Which is great in my book.

 

I agree with others that bing is crap. But hey, what can you do?

 

On the enterprise side, I haven't used the products but they're doing great. SQL server in particular is killing it. They have been crap in the past but made great strides in in the past 10-20 years and clients are pretty happy with them. Are they the best? I don't think so. But they're pretty decent and soooo much cheaper than what the best would be. It's all in the value prop i guess.

 

[SHDL]

I stopped using MS products more than a decade ago but I still hear amusing stories from other people about them from time to time.  Most recent anecdote:  A guy was composing a very important client email using Outlook and it froze up.  Not only the application but the entire OS.  So he turned off his laptop by pressing the power button and turned it back on, only to find out that Outlook had already sent the incomplete draft he was still working on to both his client and his boss.  He quickly sent out an apology/explanation email and people were cool with it, and I guess that says something about MS’s moat, but stories like this are enough to keep me away from their ecosystem. 

[Spekulatius]

Excel is my daily bread and butter. I can’t do without it.

[Guest longinvestor]

I have heard this vein about how shitty Microsoft products are since the early 1990’s. From then until about 5 years ago pretty uniformly it was my friends in the IT world who held this view strongly. In the last 5 to 10 years Microsoft has faded into the background behind Google FB et al. Microsoft is surely enjoying the absence of spotlight. Surely it’s their shitty products still making shitloads of $$.

 

I’ve seldom suffered the hurt that Microsoft is supposed to have inflicted. Worked just fine.

[meiroy]

I have heard this vein about how shitty Microsoft products are since the early 1990’s. From then until about 5 years ago pretty uniformly it was my friends in the IT world who held this view strongly. In the last 5 to 10 years Microsoft has faded into the background behind Google FB et al. Microsoft is surely enjoying the absence of spotlight. Surely it’s their shitty products still making shitloads of $$.

 

I’ve seldom suffered the hurt that Microsoft is supposed to have inflicted. Worked just fine.

 

Well said.  I completely missed Microsoft's turn around including the impact of games dev and the cloud due to my own personal bias against this company. Which makes me wonder if IBM can do the same.

[DTEJD1997]

hey all:

 

I stopped using MS Office personally and in my business at least 10 years ago.  I switched over to Open Office.

 

I still use "Windows" every day, but not as a mission critical application.

 

All important work is done on Mac OS.

 

I simply do not understand/see how people can get on the interwebs using Windows stuff.

[rb]

I simply do not understand/see how people can get on the interwebs using Windows stuff.

Believe me, it's not that hard.

[DooDiligence]

hey all:

 

I stopped using MS Office personally and in my business at least 10 years ago.  I switched over to Open Office.

 

I still use "Windows" every day, but not as a mission critical application.

 

All important work is done on Mac OS.

 

I simply do not understand/see how people can get on the interwebs using Windows stuff.

 

Yeah, Windows is like my Math for Liberal Arts instructor.

She does a lousy job of explaining simple concepts.

YouTube / Apple to the rescue.

[DTEJD1997]

hey all:

 

I stopped using MS Office personally and in my business at least 10 years ago.  I switched over to Open Office.

 

I still use "Windows" every day, but not as a mission critical application.

 

All important work is done on Mac OS.

 

I simply do not understand/see how people can get on the interwebs using Windows stuff.

 

Yeah, Windows is like my Math for Liberal Arts instructor.

She does a lousy job of explaining simple concepts.

YouTube / Apple to the rescue.

 

I have multiple problems with a Windows machine interacting with the interwebs...

 

A). Windows 10 is updating itself.  I mean CONSTANTLY.  I understand the need for updates...but almost every damn time the machine is turned on?  Why can't decent code be written from the origination?

 

B). I don't want to have to be constantly updating/adjusting security programs/updates and so forth...Various flavors of OS X are orders of magnitude more secure than Windows when you get on the interweb.

 

C). Windows 10 is a VAST improvement over previous flavors of Windows but it is still not as easy OR as good a user interface than OS X.

 

Windows has improved a great deal from where it was, but it is still lacking...at least in my experience.

[Spekulatius]

In my opinion, Windows 7 is vastly preferable and more reliable than Windows 10.I dont care for the new Post Windows 8 GUI either.

[rb]

In my opinion, Windows 7 is vastly preferable and more reliable than Windows 10.mIndont care for the new Post Windows 8 GUI either.

Never had a reliability problem with windows 10. In fact it never froze/crashed/ etc any of that. I find the experience very similar to windows 7.

 

The updates can be a bit annoying in default mode, but they can be configured so as to not be inconvenient. The one big improvement in 10 over 7 is Storage Spaces which I find awesome. There may be others and I don't know them because I don't use the features.

 

The annoying bit is that since 8 solitaire has ads. Seriously Microsoft? That's where you're gonna make money? Solitaire ads?

[Borgesian]

I use the office suite of programs on a daily basis (especially OneDrive, Excel and OneNote), never have any issues with them.

 

Also switched to Microsoft hardware 5 years ago and the Surface lineup of goods is pretty great, have had fewer issues with them than my friends who have bought Macs in the last 5 years.

 

Edit: Also the compatibility with various software that you can't always find on IOS makes it rather hard for me to switch from W10.

[DooDiligence]

I miss Minesweeper.

[rkbabang]

I miss Minesweeper.

 

There is a bunch of minesweeper apps on the apple app store.

[DooDiligence]

I miss Minesweeper.

 

There is a bunch of minesweeper apps on the apple app store.

 

;D

 

If there's one that uncovers 7th chords in all positions & qualities, I'd play it.

Truly a hazardous minefield.